WI GOP, Walker, entombing state in economic backwater
The GOP-led state senate is determined to send to Scott Walker a repeal of the law requiring family-supporting "prevailing wages" be paid to workers on local government public works projects, like schools and roads.
The GOP legislators want to do this now even though they have yet to get Walker's punitive, sleaze-laden budget out of committee though the state fiscal year expired a week ago, so intent are they to let their corporate funders know they will always put ideology and special interests over public agendas and service.
And in this case, wage stability and professional worker development, as the contractors say.
Regardless, Walker has said he will sign whatever rollbacks to the prevailing wage law his legislative allies can adopt - - just as he signed the legislature's anti-union 'right-to-work bill earlier this year after disingenuously saying it would never arrive at his desk - - thus broadening his four-year assault on a range of local controls by cities, school boards and other grassroots units of government and expanding his promised "divide-and-conquer" attack - - see video, his words - - on unions and the wage stability they provide statewide.
Policy attacks that also diminish the political clout of unions, and Democrats, which is the Walker/GOP goal.
Add the additional downward wage pressure in the GOP legislators' budget amendment sneakiness that further embeds the $7.25 minimum wage as Wisconsin's base - - the amendment wipes out the state's existing obligation to make sure workers are paid a "livable wage" - - and you see we have little chance of saving, let along expanding, the Wisconsin middle-class that is shrinking faster than in any other state.
Data show that whatever job growth there has been in Wisconsin in recent years is exclusively in low-wage categories, according to UW-M researchers.
You know, UW-M -- which Walker and the GOP-led legislature are assigning the harshest cut shoved a budget so completely-corrupted by insider politics that even GOP-friendly media are attacking it.
How Walker sells all that plus his failed 250,000 new jobs' promise as a replicable and meritorious economic plan to voters in 49 other states and DC is up to national media and his potential rivals.
The GOP legislators want to do this now even though they have yet to get Walker's punitive, sleaze-laden budget out of committee though the state fiscal year expired a week ago, so intent are they to let their corporate funders know they will always put ideology and special interests over public agendas and service.
And in this case, wage stability and professional worker development, as the contractors say.
Regardless, Walker has said he will sign whatever rollbacks to the prevailing wage law his legislative allies can adopt - - just as he signed the legislature's anti-union 'right-to-work bill earlier this year after disingenuously saying it would never arrive at his desk - - thus broadening his four-year assault on a range of local controls by cities, school boards and other grassroots units of government and expanding his promised "divide-and-conquer" attack - - see video, his words - - on unions and the wage stability they provide statewide.
Policy attacks that also diminish the political clout of unions, and Democrats, which is the Walker/GOP goal.
Add the additional downward wage pressure in the GOP legislators' budget amendment sneakiness that further embeds the $7.25 minimum wage as Wisconsin's base - - the amendment wipes out the state's existing obligation to make sure workers are paid a "livable wage" - - and you see we have little chance of saving, let along expanding, the Wisconsin middle-class that is shrinking faster than in any other state.
Data show that whatever job growth there has been in Wisconsin in recent years is exclusively in low-wage categories, according to UW-M researchers.
You know, UW-M -- which Walker and the GOP-led legislature are assigning the harshest cut shoved a budget so completely-corrupted by insider politics that even GOP-friendly media are attacking it.
How Walker sells all that plus his failed 250,000 new jobs' promise as a replicable and meritorious economic plan to voters in 49 other states and DC is up to national media and his potential rivals.
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